November 28, 2011

There are three main aspects to Delicious that make it a handy service:

Organise: Save URLs (or links) in the Delicious bookmark tool

Manage: Collect and build links around a common theme

Share: Share your links with other users and find and follow Delicious collectors with similar interests.

The great thing about Delicious is that it can be used in a variety of situations. So, for example, while I have collected links around the theme of Jane Austen in preparation for an article I hope to publish, I have also been able to build a stack of links on the theme of the Romantic Period Novel and share it with my students and colleagues, making it either private (for a select group) or public (available to all Delicious users).

How to Use a Social Bookmarking site:

Crucially, Delicious allows you to increase your search power and locate the best resources on the internet by engaging with other users, utilising a “collective intelligence” that has only been realised in recent years. With over 15 billion web pages on the internet, it can be very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff—to pick out the best bits of information. One way you can optimise the benefits of Delicious is by building up a network of “friends” (there are 5.3 million users of Delicious), selecting those with similar research interests, “following” them (just like you would on Twitter) and letting them do all the hard research for you—just like a good friend should! Simply click on their profile and select “follow”.

For thing 15 we’re asking you to register for Delicious and bookmark or “tag” some useful sites. Follow the step-by-step instructions to get started.

The author for this week's theme is Francesca Scott. Francesca is a doctoral researcher in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on the history of midwifery, female sexuality and female health in the eighteenth century. She will be supporting your progress this week through your blogs. Or you can contact Francesca through her Research Match profile.

The phrase “getting organised” tends to fill us with dread. When we sit down with a new research project in front of us, observe with horror the extent of the task before us, our urge is to start blindly researching in a mad panic. We might start by randomly typing key words into Google, find some interesting sites, but forget to bookmark them, or end of with hundreds of bookmarks without any coherence. Or we might start scribbling down quotes, references and citations on bits of paper, which then end up in a jumble, tucked into books, at the bottom of bags, or—worse still— in that stack of papers we all have somewhere in our homes. Compiling a bibliography or a reading list can then suddenly descend into anarchy. Coping with other people’s organisation (or the lack of it) can be equally stressful. In academia, people live busy lives, and finding a suitable time to sit down as a team, a class, a network or even as a reading group, to discuss the next step, or to outline the scope of the research project, can be a daunting task.

The “Getting Organised” tutorial seeks to address these three particularly troublesome areas of academic life. To help with the problem of organising bookmarks we have Delicious, a social bookmarking web service, which allows us to save, collect and share links of interest. To avoid destroying an entire rainforest, there is Mendeley, a social reference management site which allows us to collate and share research papers and also format our references, without ever having to write on a piece of paper. Finally, we will explore Doodle, a calendar tool that can be used to coordinate meetings, and thus avoid that endless backwards and forwards of emails.

Other than allowing us to feel more in control of our academic and —by extension— personal lives, “Getting Organised” facilitates sharing and collaboration; each “thing” prompts you to connect with people outside of your discipline and even outside of academia, with, for example, relevant and important industries, thus helping you to raise your academic profile, improve your research and/or strengthen the relationship you have with your students.

November 23, 2011

So far this week our ‘things’ have focused on making publications available in open access in one way or another but there is another growing area of open access that is becoming increasingly important; open access to research data. Traditionally it had been possible to publish research data alongside the journal article/book chapter describing the research; however with the changes in technology and the sheer scale of the data involved it is not always practical or possible to share data in this way. Research data is not just the quantitative data produced by scientific instruments, it can also be artifacts, transcripts of interviews, lists of archival materials, lab books and notes, specimens and sample, photographs, videotapes and more.

Managing your research data is an important part of the research process and the past year has seen the introduction of ‘data management plans’ (DMPs) as a requirement of new funding applications. This process ideally begins with a DMP before the start of the project and before any data is created. These plans allow you to consider a number of issues and who has responsibility for the data at each stage, for example:

What data will be created and in what format?

What are the legal or ethical issues associated with the data?

Where do the intellectual property rights lie with the data?

Once the research begins the DMP can help researchers to make important decision about storage and back-ups for the research data. At he end of the project the DMP can also guide the researchers in the most appropriate way to select what data they need to store and want to share. The UK Data Archive has created a really useful guide to all the steps in the life cycle.

Research data is an incredibly valuable resource and in many cases can have multiple uses after the end of the original project. Sharing research data after the end of the project can encourage further research branching from the original project; can lead to new collaborations; encourages the transparency and the improvement of research practice; can reduce the cost of further data collection and as always can increase your profile as a research output in its own right in the same way as a journal article or book chapter. Research funders, such as the Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust have added the requirement for data sharing as a condition of funding, in the same way as they have mandated open access to other research outputs.

Increasingly data this made available is being made available in data centres and through systematic services who are focused on not only storing the data but increasing the ability of researchers to reuse and cite the data enabling researchers to easily give credit to the original creators of the research. It is well worth reading through some of the resources in the further information section and thinking about what this change in the scholarly process could mean for you.

To complete this thing write a blog post about what you’ve learned about the research data challenge and how it might affect your research.

November 22, 2011

With the rise of open access and the increasingly ubiquitous nature of the Internet has come a heightened awareness of copyright in relation to digital content. Journal publishers have introduced a range of additional permissions to allow author’s to make versions available and the Creative Commons (CC) licenses have been introduced to allow scholars more protection and more flexibility to collaborate.

For research postgraduates copyright is an important consideration when considering electronic availability of their thesis. Since the introduction of the University policy in 2008 requiring that all students submit an electronic version of their thesis, copyright of both the students own material and material they have used has been a concern to postgraduate researchers. This has been the first experience of formal publication for some students and should be approached in this way.

To complete this thing please read the advice on the WRAP pages and blog about what areas of your research you might have to take special care over when considering the electronic availability of your thesis.

Creative Commons is a system of licenses that people can use to tell people what rights they reserve and which rights they have waived for users of their electronic content. For example many people who use Flickr to host their photos will give them a CC license to show that they are happy with people reusing their images but not with them selling the images to others. This photo on Flickr shows the license in the owner settings at the bottom right hand side. If, when you submit your thesis, you decide you would like to use a CC license for your content, please get in touch with the WRAP team and we can discuss what options are available.

You may also see CC licenses (represented by logos like the one above) on whole journals or on individual journal articles. CC licenses are a growing alternative to the traditional Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTA) signed by researchers that often give complete rights over the researchers’ work to the publisher. Which is one of the main reasons to carefully read any CTA you are asked to sign, so you are aware of what rights you retain and how this affects what you can do with your publication in future. The Directory of Open Access Journals list over 7000 open access journals covering all fields many of which use a CC license.

Additional Things:

Investigate one of the best known open access journals, PLoS ONE, which covers reports on primary research in any scientific discipline. All the articles published by PLoS ONE are available under the Creative Commons Attribution License and also incorporate social collaboration tools such as comments and sharing options.

November 21, 2011

‘Green’ open access material is most often made available in databases referred to as ‘repositories’ or ‘research archives’. These databases can be an invaluable source of information. Researchers can use them to view papers they may not ordinarily have access to and evaluate if they need to go to the expense of acquiring the final published version. These databases come in three major forms:

Aggregator repositories,

Subject based repositories and

Institutional repositories.

Aggregator repositories bring together the records from a number of smaller repositories in a single user interface and subject repositories, as the name suggests, focus on a single subject area or discipline. We are going to look at the final type of repository: the institutional repository. These cover outputs from a range of subjects but that are produced by the researchers of a single institution.

WRAP is the research archive for the University and hosts a range of research outputs including journal articles, PhD theses, conference papers, working papers, book chapters, reports and more. The Publications service complements WRAP by holding bibliographical references for material we cannot make publicly available, either because we do not have permission, or the permitted version of the work. WRAP and the Publications service create a showcase of the material produced by Warwick researchers and are both designed especially to maximise the visibility and impact of the material listed in the service. Both services are harvested by a range of aggregator repositories and have their content indexed by Google and Google Scholar.

The reach of the service is large and international: we had more than 29,000 visitors in October 2011 and the 5700 papers were downloaded more than 26,000 times. Visitors and users of materials come from all around the world as can be seen by the latest WRAP statistics. WRAP can also provide researchers with a range of usage metrics to help illustrate the impact of a paper.

Use WRAP to find information:
To complete this thing please follow the step-by-step instructions to set up an RSS feed for the new items added to WRAP or the Publications service for your department.

Additionally to Thing 12 you may wish to investigate some of the aggregator or subject based repositories . Most of those below will allow you to set up similar feeds for new material or material on a specific subject or set of search terms and are all useful tools to find research.

Good examples of aggregator repository are:

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) hosted by the Bielefeld University Library and contains information from over 2000 databases and is international in scope.

Yvonne Budden is the author for this week's theme. Yvonne is a librarian and is the E-repositories manager here at Warwick. Yvonne will be supporting registered participants on this 23 Things course through your blogs, and please also at an Open Access drop-in, Wednesday 23 November, 12-1 REx Seminar Room 3. Bring along any of your questions on open access, WRAP or copyright!

Over the past decade the way scholars publish their material has seen some radical changes. Scholars have become dissatisfied by the speed of publishing and the balance of power between researchers and publishers. One of the solutions that has been developed is open access. The below video explains some more:

Open access to information serves the interests of many different groups; Researchers gain from a wider audience than they might have had from traditional journal publication as their work is visible to every search tool on the web and records in repositories like the Warwick Research Archive Portal are actively harvested by large aggregator services. There is also some evidence that open access can improve the number of citations for each paper. Readers are no longer restricted to just what their library can afford. Funding bodies require public access to publicly funded research and the members of the public who no longer have to negotiate costly access to journals.

Open access is achieved in two broad fashions:

‘Green’ open access is a system that works in concert with existing publishing models. Most commonly this allows the author to make available the ‘accepted’ version of their paper in a repository or on their own websites. The accepted version is also known as the post-print or final author’s version, the version after peer review but before publisher copy editing.

‘Gold’ open access is a system of open access which is achieved through the traditional publishing process. This allows the final, published version to be made open access following the payment of a fee, usually known as the “article processing charge”. Some funders have created mechanisms and funds to assist authors in paying these fees where they have mandated open access to funded research.

Open access began as a movement to provide access to research results, in the form of traditional scholarly outputs, e.g. journal articles, books, etc. Open access, however can cover a wide range of material; from open educational resources (OERs; lecture notes and videos of lectures etc.); open research data; research blogs; grey literature; open science (experimental data and lab procedures) and many others. Open access allows researchers to reach a wider audience with their work and can lead to collaboration with colleagues in other institutions around the world and with industry.

Many of the earlier ‘things’ have emphasised the importance of your online presence when building your reputation as a researcher: open access to your research can be a vital part of this process. The things we will look at this week are intended as a short introduction to some of the ways in which you can interact with open access and some of the things you may need to consider when doing so.

November 15, 2011

There are no “Things” to be published this week. We’re taking a break from the relentless pace of the Autumn term so you can take this week to catch up to Thing 11, or rest on your laurels if you’ve investigated and blogged about all 11 Things already!

Keep on blogging your way through the course so that our tutors can support you and we know that you’re taking part.

More “things” to come!

Next week we’ll be looking at the theme of Open Access, and we will also be looking at some reference management tools, collaborative working possibilities and multimedia things, all before Christmas and the end of all the 23 Things course. Stick with us, there’s lots more to explore!

And if you get withdrawal symptoms, you can always go back and set up another RSS alert. Or tweet with the #digitalwarwick tag again…

November 07, 2011

While many of the tools we’ve looked at are useful for keeping in contact with people you meet at conferences, Lanyrd is a new service which takes this to a higher level. Rather than just connecting individuals, it uses social media to allow connections to emerge at every stage of the conference. It draws on your existing social networks to help you find conferences, connect with others who are participating, find coverage of events, promote your own coverage and track your history of participating in conferences.

For thing 11 we're asking you to log into Lanyrd and list, or register your participation in, an event. As ever here are the step-by-step instructions. And don't forget to blog about it.

Like all of the tools on 23 Things, even if it’s not immediately obvious that Lanyrd will be something you personally want to use, it’s good to be aware of it and perhaps check back in future. While it may not be popular in your discipline yet, if it becomes so in future, it will be an incredibly powerful tool for networking.

So you have a twitter account, you know how to use it and you’re in contact with some of the other people on the 23 Things course. Now what? Find other people to follow.

Following people within your area is a great way to expand your network. Even if you don’t personally interact with the people in question, having their tweets added to your feed can be hugely beneficial. For instance once you follow a wide range of people in your area, your twitter feed soon becomes full of an interesting and diverse range of articles, papers, videos and podcasts which people link to in their tweets. There’s so much information on the web and so much content posted on Twitter that being selective about who you follow is necessary if you want to cut through the clutter and find what you’re interested in.

In this way Twitter can function as a form of social filtering, helping us find content online which will be useful or interesting to us. Exactly who you follow will shape the extent to which this is the case and it’s something which rewards work and thought. But how do you know who to follow?

A great way of finding people to follow is to use the lists feature. This allows Twitter users to create lists of people within a particular area. Go to each of the lists linked below and look through the people listed in them. Is there any one you want to follow? If so then select ‘follow’ and you’ll rapidly have a wide range of academics in your Twitter network.

Now we’ll explore how to engage with your network on Twitter through replies, retweets and hashtags. Replies are self-explanatory: they are tweets you send in response to someone else’s tweet. Retweets takes someone else’s tweet and forwards it to all your followers e.g. if you thought the tweet was interesting and want to share it with others. The step-by-step guide for thing 9 describes how to reply and retweet in the context of using hashtags but please note that anything on twitter can be replied to or retweeted, even if it has no connection with a hashtag.

Hash tags are a way to mark a tweet as being about a certain topic. For instance if I tweet about BBC Question Time during the show, I’ll mark the tweet with the hashtag “#bbcqt” e.g. “not convinced by government minister’s answer #bbcqt”. This hashtag is an established convention, encouraged by the BBC show’s producers, to facilitate discussion about the show. When you click on the hash tag in a tweet, or enter it into the ‘search’ box at the top of the twitter interface, all tweets marked with the hashtag will be displayed. In this way hashtags let Twitter uses see what people are tweeting about events, issues or topics.